Improved Dragster 3 – Articulate integration

Until recently the only way to embed a Dragster 3 activity in an Articulate presentation was to use the Web Object option. This approach suffers from a couple of drawbacks in that Articulate player elements (e.g. pop-up windows for notes and attachments) would disappear behind the Dragster activity and also the authoring process wasn’t straight forward as you would have to publish the dragster activity on-line and independently of the articulate presentation. With recent updates to Dragster 3 you can now use the Flash Movie option to embed a Dragster activity which avoid these drawbacks.

The steps involved in embedding a Dragster 3 activity are:

Author your Dragster 3 activity in the usual way (Tip – use the landscape layout option as this fits best into an articulate
presentation)

Unzip the downloaded activity files. You will see they consist of a single flash SWF file with a name like dragndrop1023.swf and a similarly named folder which contains the rest of the activity related files.

In Powerpoint click the Articulate, Insert Flash Movie button. Browse to the SWF file for your published Dragster activity and click Open.

In the Flash Movie settings change the Advance to the next slide option to When user clicks next and Synchronisation option to Movie displays independently of slide. Click OK to finish inserting the Flash movie.

The embedded Dragster activity will be displayed as a blank rectangle which will extend beyond the edges of the powerpoint
slide. Resize this activity by dragging the handles at the sides and corners of this rectangle for a more appropriate fit (Tip – hold down the shift key when resizing to maintain the aspect ratio of the activity). NB – if you set this slide’s articulate Slide properties to Change view to the No sidebar display option you don’t have to resize the embedded Dragster activity!

Repeat the activity and publishing process described above for each activity you wish to add to the Articulate presentation.

Publish the completed Articulate presentation.

Copy the folders of the dragster activity related files into the root folder of the published Articulate presentation.